A federal judge has dismissed most of the lawsuits filed by a black Texas high school student who claimed that school administrators violated his civil rights by insisting he cut his hair to comply with school rules.
Darryl George’s struggle with Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu (a town about 40 minutes outside of Houston) began last summer when he was suspended multiple times because of his naturally curly hair.
According to local media reports, school officials said George’s curls reached below his eyebrows and earlobes, which violates the district’s dress code for male students.
During his penultimate year of school, George missed most of his regular classes and was excluded from school during the day.
“He has to sit on a stool in a cubicle for eight hours,” Darryl’s mother, Darresha George, told the Associated Press at the time. “It’s very uncomfortable. Every day when he came home he said his back hurt because he had to sit on a stool.”
George and his mother then sued the school district, the county school board, its principal and assistant principal, as well as Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton for violating the state’s CROWN (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) Act, which prohibits racial hair discrimination.
George was initially suspended just one day before the Texas law went into effect nationwide on September 1 of last year.
In his ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown dismissed the lawsuits against Abbott, Paxton and district and school employees.
Brown also rejected the claim that enforcement was primarily against black students, as well as the claim that George’s First Amendment rights were violated by the school district’s policy. The judge said the school did not demonstrate a “persistent, widespread practice of disparate, racially biased enforcement” with its policy. As for the free speech claim, he noted that there is no precedent showing that hair length is supported by the First Amendment.
George’s claim of gender discrimination, however, remained. In his ruling, Brown wrote, “What is the rationale for the distinction between male and female students in the dress code? Because the district provides no rationale for the gender distinctions in its dress code, the complaint survives this first phase.”
Brown acknowledged that the state’s lawsuit was not without its problems, pointing to a similar case from 1970 in which the judge concluded that “the existence and enforcement of the hair-cutting rule is far more disruptive to the flow of instruction than the hair it is intended to prohibit.”
Brown wrote: “Unfortunately, that is the case here too.”
Copyright: NPR
